


Suspectum

by gonfalonier



Category: Breaking Bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-03
Updated: 2011-10-03
Packaged: 2017-10-24 09:37:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/261901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gonfalonier/pseuds/gonfalonier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fill for <a href="http://waltzmatildah.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://waltzmatildah.livejournal.com/"><b>waltzmatildah</b></a>'s lovely prompt over <a href="http://oxoniensis.livejournal.com/489753.html?thread=30376473#t30376473">here</a>, where she posed the all-important question: Where the hell is Jesse's head at right now?!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Suspectum

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU, branching off from the events of 4x10.

Sunday morning, Jesse’s already waiting on his front steps when Mike’s car sidles up to the curb. It’s time to go pick up the week’s drops, which means money, business, another day above ground for Mike, Mr. White, and himself. Jesse could give a shit. It also means another long-ass day going the speed limit in Mike’s old-man car, waiting silently in the desert sun. Inhumane fucking conditions. Mike won’t even let him turn on the radio.

He pushes himself up off the step and shuffles over to the car door. As he slides inside he grumbles to Mike, “Didn’t we get into this so we _wouldn’t_ have to do the same thing every day?”

Mike breathes out an indifferent noise, turn his eyes to the rearview mirror, and pulls the car out onto the street.

\--

Ten minutes seem like an hour, and Jesse may be a quiet passenger but he’s far from still. He fidgets, drums his fingers on the armrest, shifts in his seat, hisses as he picks at a hangnail. It’s on the tip of his tongue to ask how Gus is, but he resists; he can already hear Mike’s fluey voice in his head: _Do I look like a doctor to you? Jesus._ There’s nothing either of them can do for him, and Mike has stressed the importance of keeping up like everything’s under control.  
The word about the massacre hasn’t left the cartel yet. Better to stick to their routine until circumstances force them to show their hand.

The thing is, Mike does look like a doctor. He managed to clean out, disinfect, and stitch up his own bullet wound and do what he could with Gus. Jesse wasn’t there to see it – Mike made him wait in the car – but he saw the aftermath in the motel bathroom when he went in to help Mike lay Gus out on the bed. As far as either of them know, Gus is still there, waiting, hoping his wounds don’t get infected.

The thought of infection makes Jesse’s stomach turn, but that might also be the three days without food. Just as he thinks this, the car passes a guy selling fruit, horchata, and foil-wrapped tacos out of his trunk. Jesse watches him disappear in the rearview mirror. Inhumane fucking conditions.

\--

The first three drops are uneventful. Well. There’s this huge fucking lizard thing at the second one that hisses when Jesse touches it with the toe of his shoe, but that thrill fades fast. Maybe if there had been a tarantula around to battle with it. Jesse thinks about getting home and pulling out his sketchbook to draw up that fight. _Tarantula Woman vs. Lizard Guy._  
On the way to the fourth site, the gas indicator on the dash lights up with a ding. “Hey,” Jesse says lamely, “you need gas.”

It’s another four miles before they find a Valero, and Mike limps his car up to the pump. They’re smack-ass in the middle of nowhere, one of only three cars in the lot: It’s just them, a white Civic, and a neon purple ‘Vette, the tackiest piece of shit Jesse’s ever seen.

Mike pulls out his billfold to check his cash supply, which makes Jesse laugh: There's three envelopes fat with the stuff right there in the glove compartment.

As Mike makes to open his door, Jesse leans over and says again, “Hey,” making Mike turn to look at him expectantly. “Hey, uh, get me a donut or something while you’re in there, huh? Like jelly or glazed or some shit, something with sugar. Or a sandwich. Or one of those packs of peanut butter crackers, _something_.” He’s close to saying something about how he’s dying out here, but he doesn’t want to give Mike any ideas, so instead he just says, “And, uh, something for yourself, too, if you want.”

“Very generous,” Mike answers, toneless and tired. “Stay here.” And then he heads inside.

Jesse doesn’t know how he did it, but Mike managed to park at an angle where the sun is beating down through the passenger window, right in that spot where the visor doesn’t reach. He tries fiddling with his seat, then messing with the visor only to break off the piece of plastic that pushes into the thing, the latch-thing, so he stops and lets it go. Propping an arm on his chest, he slumps, buries his face in his hand, and closes his eyes to block out the worst of the light.

He blinks them open again when a cloud passes over the sun, big enough to block it out, and he realizes Mike still hasn’t come back. “Take your fucking time, bitch,” Jesse mutters to the empty car. Then it occurs to him that maybe something’s wrong, maybe Mike’s in some kind of trouble in there, but that doesn’t sound right. Mike _is_ the trouble. So if something’s gone south in this Valero, it’s gone way fucking south.

He opens the glove compartment and retrieves the handgun from under the envelopes.  
When he steps outside, he looks around to check if there’s anything obviously weird before he launches himself into a potential shitstorm inside the mini-mart. Nothing. Just the same two cars in the spaces, an RV fueling up in the corner of the lot, and an actual fucking tumbleweed blowing down the road. Jesse squints. Plodding steadily, following behind the tumbleweed, is that same lizard from before. The exact same, right down to the jagged yellow stripe across its back.

Turning back to the front door of the store, Jesse looks down at the gun in his hand. It feels heave, warming up in his palm. What’s he going to do if he goes in there and the place is full of cops or DEA? He’s frozen before in a crisis, locked up with panic, confusion, PTSD or whatever the fuck. If he goes in, he’s going to be expected to act; Mike’s only going to risk one ear for him.

The cloud rolls on. Jesse can feel the sun burn into his skull. He tucks the pistol into the waistband of his boxers, against his back, and starts toward the door, trying to make his stiff posture look casual.

The door to the food-mart slides open silently on its hinges. Inside, it’s empty, near-silent apart from the chug of the freezers and the buzz of the overhead lights. Over the thudding of his own heart, Jesse hears the low drone of a housefly somewhere in the aisles.

He’s about to call out for Mike when a rustle catches his attention. He turns toward it sharply, hand defensively darting to the small of his back where the gun is resting.

There at the cashier’s counter, two kids, maybe fifteen years old, are pointing guns of their own. Blue bandanas cover their mouths, and they’re holding their semi-automatics with both arms extended straight, elbows locked.

Jesse frantically scans the aisles for Mike, but unless he’s crouched behind the row of chips and nuts, he’s made a break for it. Asshole.

He look back to the counter, where the two boys don’t seem to have moved. There’s no way they haven’t noticed him, but they’re still training their guns at the unfortunate cashier. Jesse doesn’t look to him. His mind tells him, plaintively, he doesn’t want to see that man’s face.

Taking a step forward, Jesse mumbles aloud to himself, “Say something. Say something.” Clearing his throat, he yells, _“Hey.”_ The boy on the left wheels on him, and Jesse can see the tremble in his arms, the sweat dripping into his wide eyes. Jesse extends his own arm, gun in hand. He doesn’t even remember pulling it. Second nature.

“How do you think this is gonna end?” he asks, taking another step. The kid steps back but doesn’t answer, so Jesse nods to the register behind them. “You think you’re gonna walk out of here with bag of cash, take it back to your bosses, and get, like, a pat on the fucking back? A cookie?” He shakes his head. “All they’re doing with this? Here?” He gestures to the scene in front of him. The kid on the right is starting to look back in nervous glances. “All they’re doing is making you their _bitch_. You think you’re in, but you’re not in. You’re _never_ in. This is _bitch_ work. And once you’re a bitch, you’re a bitch for life.”

With one more step, Jesse’s within arm’s reach of both kids. When he extends his gun, the muzzle brushes over the boy’s skin, right between his eyebrows. He can see how hard the kid’s breathing from the way the bandana sucks up against his mouth with every inhale. Their eyes are locked, but in his periphery Jesse can see the other dude starting to panic and trying to decide where to focus his attention. Maybe Jesse’s better at this shit than he thought.

“Do you even know what a bitch is?” he goes on, like he can buy more time the longer he talks. “A bitch is property. The guy you’re taking this money to?” He gestures with his gun, making the boy in front of him flinch. “He can trade you around, turn you out to whoever he wants. He doesn’t even have to get a good price for you because it’s not _about_ money. For these fuckers, the guys you’re working for, it’s about _power_. Being able to look another dude in the eye, point to you and go, ‘This is my bitch.’”

Finally, the dude at the counter speaks up, looking frantically over his shoulder. “Hey, man, shut the fuck up and get –”

Before the guy can even finish his thought, Jesse steps back and shoots the accomplice in the knee. The boy falls to the ground with a screech and flails on the ground, howling. “And if you ever get _injured?_ ” he continues, kicking the gun out of the kid’s hand. “You get dick. That’s all you get.”

A calm passes over him, something he hasn’t felt in ages. He glances down at the kid on the floor, who’s still whimpering profanities and clutching his blood-soaked knee. He looks back up just in time to see the other guy book it out the door, stumble into the purple Corvette, and peel out of the parking lot. Jesse just shakes his head and tucks his gun back into the waistband of his boxers.

Walking past the boy bleeding on the tile floor, Jesse finally approaches the counter. At this point, Jesse thinks he’s entitled to at least a free pack of gum.

“Hey,” he says, scanning the row of candy and impulse buys on the rack under the counter. “A ‘thank you’ might be cool.”

When he stands up straight to look that cashier in the eye, he feels the hair on the back of his neck prickle up.

“Mr. White?”

Just as Walter White is about to speak, a bullet cracks through the air and hits him square between the eyes. A fine mist of blood sprays out against the back wall as the bullet bores through his skull.

Jesse opens his mouth but finds it impossible to breathe or make a sound. Everything slows down. He turns, eyes wide and wild, to see who fired the shot, but all he can see is light, so close and white that it blinds him.

“Time to wake up, kid.”

Mike is shaking his shoulder. Jesse makes an undignified sound as he wakes up suddenly and scrambles backward against the passenger door. Mike just laughs and mutters, “You must’ve been _out_.”

“Yeah,” Jesse says warily as he relaxes back into his seat. “This boring shit’d put anyone to sleep.”

Mike just starts the car, no response, like Jesse hasn’t said anything at all. He pulls to the edge where the station’s pull-in meets the road and pauses. “Got you this,” he says, and hands Jesse a plastic bag: a powdered-sugar jelly donut (the red kind; Jesse smiles a little) and a bottle of coke.

“Thanks,” Jesse says. He means it. He bites into the donut, and it’s a little stale and pretty fucking perfect. If anyone shoots Mr. White – and no one will, they won’t even get close – Jesse hopes it’s this guy.

As they pull out onto the road, Jesse’s engrossed in his donut, his eyes closed as he savors it. Just a minute later, he’s pulled out of his reverie as Mike suddenly swerves the car into the other lane and back again.

“What the fuck, man!”

Mike’s only reply is, “There was a thing in the road.”

Jesse glances in the rearview mirror to see that exact same lizard, the one from before, it has to be. The exact fucking same.


End file.
